Chapter 17

The Empire Redivivus

Between the Panic of 1873 and the winter of 1885-86 four new trunk railways were pushed
through to the Pacific, the range cattle industry expanded over the plains into Wyoming and
Montana, and mechanized wheat farming appeared in areas like the Red River Valley of
Minnesota and the San Joaquin Valley of California. This period saw a great boom in settlement
beyond the Missippi, as the population of Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado more than doubled
and the Dakotas, the Pacific Northwest, and the Rocky Mountain states grew rapidly. Eastern
capitalists had a greater hand in this surge of agricultural expansion then ever before, buying the
farmland mortgages and owning many of the great cattle companies. Eastern attention
turned from postwar problems to Western development, and the victorious Republican party
supported expansion for reasons of platform and pocketbook--many of its members held stock
in the railroads now criscrossing the continent.

Linus P. Brockett's Our Western Empire: or the New West Beyond the Mississippi
reveals Eastern exuberance about the growth of the West, celebrates the triumph of agriculture
over the myth of the desert and heralds the advent of a continental American empire based
on the agrarian paradise of the garden of the world. Brockett's empire is a static, intransitive
one, notable for its lack of reference to further westward movement or a "passage to India." The
character of the American empire was thus defined by a relation between man and nature--the
virtuous yeoman toiling on his family-sized farm--which ignored both the experiences of history
and the larger world community. The myth of the garden implied simultaneously a fortunate
plenitude and a distrust of industrialization and urbanization; only virtue grew within the garden,
while all evil influences were an alien intrusion from without.

The foreign policy derivable from this formulation is isolationist and corresponds to a vision of
domestic society as self-reliant, classless and homogenous. The myth of the garden's inability to
deal with the tragic aspects of human experience--disaster and suffering--and its wilfull denial of
the forces of world economy--the Northwest, for example, relied increasingly on European and
Asian grain markets--ultimately brought about its demise. Simple economic hardship would
soon destroy the myth's influence and close out the frontier period in American history.